- Fuel for thought
This is not because of technological difficulties or a conspiracy on the part of the auto industry. It’s because automakers have listened to car buyers, and put their energy into making vehicles bigger and faster, rather than more efficient. In calling for a law requiring better gas mileage in our cars, then, voters are really saying that they’re unhappy with the collective result of the choices they make as buyers. Sometimes, they know, we need to save ourselves from ourselves.
This is one of those bits of evidence that makes free-market economists cringe like a creationist who has just been run through the gauntlet of evidence for Darwinian evolution through natural selection. This is a big part of the reason why the best markets are regulated markets — market forces won’t necessarily perform the way that the collective group of buyers want, instead focusing on the individual. But markets are better thought of in terms of populations, not hierarchies. (Compare the difference in point of view to Reagan’s “trickle-down” idea of free-market economics.) Regulated markets, then, are better because they (perhaps paradoxically) are able to better reflect the wishes of the population as a whole.
- Things I wish I’d known when I was younger
I don’t buy the romantic notion that my life has been somehow richer or more interesting because of all the times I screwed up; nor that the mistakes were “put” there to help me learn. I made them myself—through ignorance, fear, and a dumb wish to have everyone like me—and life and work would have been less stressful and more enjoyable (and certainly more successful) without them. So here are some of the things I wish I had learned long ago. I hope they may help a few of you avoid the mistakes that I made back then.
- Perfect timing doesn’t exist; stop waiting for it
It bothers me when I hear people describe a personal set of conditions that need to be met before they can make the next move in their life.
Most often, they’re just making excuses — creating obstacles that aren’t actually there, placing the blame on some outside force they can’t control, and choosing to let day after day of inaction turn into many years of waiting for their cosmos to align.
Risk is what life is all about. If you don’t take risks, you never get rewards, and you can still fail. And in the end, you’re just going to die anyway, so why not take the risk? To quote Steve Jobs, “have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
Notice that I’m actually going into film school, instead of just talking about it. There’s a huge chance that I could fail in my endeavour to change careers to film-making, but that doesn’t really matter — I would fail worse if I just stayed in a dead-end job that I didn’t like for the rest of my life.
- Lies, damn lies, and Hollywood
The problem isn’t with American filmmakers, many of whom are doing exciting work right now (wait until fall), but with mainstream-studio-chief thinking. The people who finance big movies are still pretending they’re doing it for everyone, but the only segment of ”everyone” they’re willing to spend enormous sums of money wooing are 15-to-24-year-old males and little kids (and whomever they drag along). The true translation of ”We’re giving the people what they want” is ”We’re making the only kind of movies we know how to sell, and we’re selling them to the only demographics we know how to sell to.” Everyone else is treated as a minority or special-interest group — including women, who get one or two mid-budget films tossed at them per summer (usually the extent of studio thinking about that half of the population is ”Um…is Angelina Jolie available?”), and ”old people” (in Hollywood, that means all Americans 35 and over), who are brushed off until well after Labor Day.
- 5 business lessons from Costco
Good wages and benefits are why Costco has extremely low rates of turnover and theft by employees, he said. And Costco’s customers, who are more affluent than other warehouse store shoppers, stay loyal because they like that low prices do not come at the workers’ expense. “This is not altruistic,” he said. “This is good business.
- MIT team designs sleek, skintight spacesuit
Newman’s prototype suit is a revolutionary departure from the traditional model. Instead of using gas pressurization, which exerts a force on the astronaut’s body to protect it from the vacuum of space, the suit relies on mechanical counter-pressure, which involves wrapping tight layers of material around the body. The trick is to make a suit that is skintight but stretches with the body, allowing freedom of movement.
You. Me. Mars. Now. Any takers?
- False Copyright Claims
Teenagers downloading music may not be the worst copyright offenders. See this item (available for download in PDF file with free registration) about the growing problem of copyfraud — in which publishers, archives, and distributors make false claims of copyright to shut down free expression. From the paper: “Copyfraud is everywhere. False copyright notices appear on modern reprints of Shakespeare’s plays, Beethoven’s piano scores, greeting card versions of Monet’s Water Lilies, and even the US Constitution. Archives claim blanket copyright in everything in their collections. Vendors of microfilmed versions of historical newspapers assert copyright ownership. These false copyright claims, which are often accompanied by threatened litigation for reproducing a work without the owner’s permission, result in users seeking licenses and paying fees to reproduce works that are free for everyone to use…”
- Optimum Copyright Period Decided by Math
So how long should a copyright be valid for? A Cambridge student has stepped into the discussion with a dispassionately calculated estimate of the optimal period a copyright should be granted. Ars’ point of view: ‘Neither the US nor the UK are in any danger of rethinking copyright law from scratch, but if they were looking for guidance in how to set up their systems, Pollock has it. He develops a set of equations focused specifically on the length of copyright and uses as much empirical data as possible to crunch the numbers. The result? An optimal copyright term of 14 years, which is designed to encourage the best balance of incentive to create new work and social welfare that comes from having work enter the public domain (where it often inspires new creative acts).’ The original paper is available (pdf) online.
- The truth is that airlines have only three types of seats: Misery, Misery Lite and Slightly Comfortable
Mind you, since comfort is relative, the airlines could, in turn, raise the spirits of the economy section by introducing a new sub-economy class, in which society’s most impoverished passengers travel for free, provided they stand atop rickety stools with a noose round their necks for the duration of the flight. Suddenly your cramped economy seat will feel like a gilded throne in comparison. For about 10 minutes. Until the veins in your leg explode.
It’s even worse for me, because economy class is so not designed for tall people like me.
- Googling “how to crack a safe” nets robbers $12,000
Google has become so ubiquitous in many people’s daily lives that it serves as the all-encompassing information source on how to do nearly anything: jump a car, tie a tie, fold a pocket square, remove ketchup stains. Oh, and crack open a safe to steal $12,000.
- Wil Shipley chimes in on the iPhone’s AJAX “SDK”
Money quote:
Us programming in AJAX while Apple programs in real OS X is basically a case of Apple not eating its own dogfood, except that JavaScript isn’t dogfood, it’s dog shit.
I’ve actually been waiting to hear Wil’s view on this, because I’ve been incredibly interested in the possibility of Delicious Library on the iPhone. While I love having my library in the “notes” section of my iPod, what I really want is Delicious Library as an app, optimised for the iPhone.
- Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature
Human behavior is a product both of our innate human nature and of our individual experience and environment. In this article, however, we emphasize biological influences on human behavior, because most social scientists explain human behavior as if evolution stops at the neck and as if our behavior is a product almost entirely of environment and socialization. In contrast, evolutionary psychologists see human nature as a collection of psychological adaptations that often operate beneath conscious thinking to solve problems of survival and reproduction by predisposing us to think or feel in certain ways. Our preference for sweets and fats is an evolved psychological mechanism. We do not consciously choose to like sweets and fats; they just taste good to us.
This was a pretty good article. Some of it I already knew, but some of it I didn’t. Evolutionary psychology is a subject which has been greatly interesting to me lately.
(Hat tip: Wesa)
- GameTap Mac client!
I’m going to have to try this out! I wonder how well it works when you’re using a Playstation 2 controller with a USB-to-PS2 Controller adapter, which is what I use for a controller on my Macs.
- Bottled Water Is Still A Scam
Bottled water in America is generally less healthy than tap water, extraordinarily more expensive, and far more destructive to the environment. It’s something I started blogging about years ago, and thanks to an an exceptional package of stories in Fast Company, I had a reminder to revisit the issue.
I’ve never understood why there are people who refuse to drink tap water. I mean, okay, so if you’ve got really old pipes, you might get contaminants. So just buy a water filter, right? (Lead, for example, is a pretty heavy element, and is pretty likely to get filtered out.) It’s not like bottled water tastes better than filtered tap water, anyway.
- Henry Rollins: “This is how I protest the war.”
- Research material: imagine Earth without people
“Pretty quickly - 24, maybe 48 hours - you’d start to see blackouts because of the lack of fuel added to power stations,” says Gordon Masterton, president of the UK’s Institution of Civil Engineers in London. Renewable sources such as wind turbines and solar will keep a few automatic lights burning, but lack of maintenance of the distribution grid will scuttle these in weeks or months. The loss of electricity will also quickly silence water pumps, sewage treatment plants and all the other machinery of modern society.
- The Medical Tricorder Takes Two Steps Away From Sci Fi
Combining the technologies into one compact box may take decades. But the two latest discoveries offer incremental advances in diagnostic medicine — pointing toward more portable and less invasive medical technologies.
And then they need to jam them all into an iPhone. Then you could really say “the future is here.”